A moment of history. The RepRap project has created circuits for the first time:
Ed and I have a final-year student – Rhys Jones – who’s working on RepRap for his MEng research project. He’s been taking the old idea of depositing metal in channels and an observation of Forrest’s and Nophead’s (that you don’t need a low-melting-point alloy because the specific heat of metals is so low that they shouldn’t melt the plastic anyway).
Also worth a look: Bruce Sterling points to Darwinian Marxism as a means of ensuring the proletariat gain possession of the means of production sans revolution.
[via the Yorkshire Ranter][image from the Reprap blog]
Raise a glass, folks – fifty years ago, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments demo’d the first ever integrated circuit [pictured – from Wikimedia Commons]. From Custom PC:
In July 1958, Kilby took it upon himself to find the answer to small-scale modules with large numbers of transistors. As a new recruit at Texas Instruments he wasn’t able to take a two-week leave while his other colleagues were off sunning themselves. Instead, he confined himself to his lab alone where he came up with the idea of fabricating all of a circuit’s components with a single block of the same material. Two months later, the first integrated circuit was demonstrated, and technology has never looked back.
Thanks for the memories, Jack. 😉
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